"There is nothing inherent in the technology that prevents them from giving better service to the big company that is willing to pay a lot of money than to the

"There is nothing inherent in the technology that prevents them from giving better service to the big company that is willing to pay a lot of money than to the start-up that can't afford to pay a lot of money." No, but the technology is also not designed to facilitate such discrimination, and everything about the design of the Internet assumes net neutrality. There is nothing in TCP/IP that uniquely identifies services, nor anything that facilitates a notion of classes of service. One service may have multiple hosts and multiple IP addresses. One IP address may be shared by multiple services. It may or may not be possible to inspect packets to determine which service they belong to; nowhere is any promise of "inspectability" made. So while nothing prevents it, imposing such fees does require substantial new infrastructure to be deployed and new protocols to be developed. In other words, the Internet itself has to change to accommodate such a system -- because as designed, the Internet assumes neutrality.